My name is Mark and I am an atheist.

I was born and raised in the rural area of Missouri just around 30-40 miles west of St. Louis, back in the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was conducting peace marches all over the South. I remember mumbling the words of the Pledge of Allegiance during class in elementary school, but most of it never meant much to me except the phrase “under God”. I was around eleven years old then. I kept that particular phrase in mind and mulled over it for several years. The rest of the pledge seemed appropriate, but “under God” made no sense to me at all. It just “didn’t sit right” with my views of what the United States was all about. I became a fan of American history at an early age and the U.S. Constitution was of interest to me, so I scoured the law of our nation, but I could not find the word, “God” or “Jesus” or “Bible” mentioned.

During my preteen and teenage years I was required to attend Sunday School, Sunday morning worship, Sunday evening worship and Wednesday night prayer meeting at a local Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Church. It wasn’t all bad. I had friends there like most kids would, but I never could fully participate in the rituals of prayer, baptism or speaking in tongues. I truly thought there was something wrong with me because of my involuntary lack of understanding and faith. I tried to be like everyone that attended and attempted to be a part of those rituals, but it made no sense to me, making me feel extremely pretentious and illegitimate. A sense of self-betrayal haunted me.

During my childhood, I learned much about the Bible and like many other books I had read, I found “the good, the bad and the ugly” within its cover. “The good” was in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a good moral story, but the same type of moral content can be found in other writings as well. “The bad” was in the way God often punished or murdered his so-called “creations”. How can God do this if he loved us? “The ugly” was the unbelievable happenings of virgin births, Jonah living inside the stomach of a great fish and other outright lies. To me, lying to sway someone is very immoral. “The bad” and “the ugly” outweighed “the good”.

It wasn’t just the Bible that I found to be fictitious, but also the idea of “God”. At around the age of sixteen, I realized that I did not believe in God or any god for that matter. I felt that the existence of the Abrahamic God is no more valid than the gods of Roman, Greek and Norse mythology.

Yes, I suppose sixteen years old may be rather young for someone to assume they do not believe in deities and such, but that is what I knew at the time. I knew I was an atheist as much as I knew I did not believe in Santa Claus. That was thirty-four years ago and I am still an atheist.

I came out godless on television yesterday on 11/01/09. I started a group with other freethinkers in Evansville, Indiana and was interviewed about it. We started in May of this year and have grown to over 260 members. It was refreshing to tell this evangelical town that we exist and stand to be recognized.

As I look back now on my past as a young person, I didn’t know anything.
I thought there was a god, but only because it was expected, and fear of someone always watching me.
A few years back my son and I started discussing religion and I came to the conclusion that I really was an atheist. Talk about fear, now that was scary. To deny a god or gods that most people revere is surely a coming out process.
Now, I couldn’t care less who knows.

I was 5 years old the first time the Witnesses came to my home and spoke to my parents. I don’t remember how many times they came back, but it seemed all to quickly that my mother suddenly threw out all of our holiday decorations and I was told I couldn’t have birthdays anymore. Suddenly I had to take strange pamphlets with me to school to explain to my teachers what I was. I didn’t get to participate in any holiday activities. I was made to go to these boring meetings and day long conventions and sit and listen to things I didn’t understand. I felt so left out of everything. I wasn’t permitted to have birthdays, or to go to any parties. When I was 10 my mom allowed me to play on a soccer team at school, but I was instructed to keep it a secret. As I approached my teens I became very frightened about how good I was being, and I was so afraid of upsetting Jehovah and going to hell that I tried to do extra good, and became obsessive about my actions. I was terrified, never sure if I was being good enough. I was told when the new paradise came that all of my memories of former friends and relatives who weren’t witnesses would be completely erased. Upon reaching the age of 15, and in the middle of reading “The Crucible” in school, I realized the witnesses for what they truly are. I refused to go to any more meetings and have since set out on my own spiritual path. I am much happier now. I wish my parents had never been witnesses, and I will never put my children through such trauma.

I’m certain I was the only child in my rural, Midwestern community who was raised by an agnostic mother and a vitriolic Atheist father. To further complicate my story, and my life in Bargersville, IN (which, 25 years ago wasn’t the bustling metropolis it is today!), I decided in the first grade that I was ethically opposed to eating meat. My Atheism coming out story is really a result of my Vegetarianism coming out story.

An all-day class field trip in the second grade was scheduled to have lunch at McDonald’s. Most of the class was very excited about this prospect, but as I no longer ate at McDonald’s, I asked the teacher if other arrangements could be made for my meal. The teacher informed me that I was too young to have formed such an opinion, and told me I could eat with the rest of the class. Later, another student scolded me for not eating meat, because “God put cows on the Earth for us to eat.” Naively, I responded that I didn’t believe in any gods. Her eyes grew to the size of silver dollars, and she didn’t talk to me much after that, but other students often asked me why I was a Satanist. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew, even at age 7 or 8, that I was being ostracized for my (lack of) beliefs.

To this day, I very seldom speak of either my Vegetarianism or my Atheism (I still live in Indiana, afterall). I don’t really feel the need to ‘come out’ Atheist – it’s hardly a secret, and I don’t think of it as being any great rebellion – but I like to share my story with like-minded people.

my ascent to a humanist perspective has been a very slow and painful journey. raised independent fundamentalist baptist (IFB), i very deeply believed in heaven, hell, jesus, literal creation, virgin birth… if it was in the christian scripture, i soaked it in. i was baptized at 7, led my first convert to christ at 10, and attended bible college at 18.

after bible college, it made sense to me to learn about scriptures from the jewish perspective; so i enrolled in the judaic studies program at UCF.

to avoid deceit, i must confess that a big part of the draw was to learn how to better convert jews. don’t listen to what other evangelicals may tell you, we totally get extra points for the chosen people.

instead of finding a community of people lost and empty in their own self-deceit, everyone seemed totally normal. what’s more, a lot of them were atheists, and no one seemed to have a problem with that.

i had been brought up to believe that “humanists” and “atheists” were under literal demonic influence and part of a vast evil plot by satan to destroy humanity.

imagine my surprise when the exorcisms failed.

so i’ll spare you the details of my lengthy discussions with professors, rabbis, pastors, physicists, and my cosmically important friendship with a reformed jew turned atheist.

intellectually, the evidence was clear. A fundamentalist view of the world stops working the minute you look beyond the few resources approved by your tiny sect.

emotionally, this was all very hard to accept. in order to give myself the freedom to objectively assess the situation, i had to take the chance that this was all some elaborate scheme of satan’s to deceive me.

in the end, it seemed to me that a religion worth believing in should stand up to a little objective scrutiny.

from beginning to end, it took me 5 years to drag myself out of fundamentalism completely… and another 2 years to tell anyone about it.

i was 27 when my mother found out. she cried, fumed, prayed, and kept my atheism as her shameful secret. i led a double life to save face for her.

the election in November changed everything. for the first time in a long time, i cared about something. i liked that feeling and decided it shouldn’t stop.

i refuse to feel like an outcast because i’m no longer religious, and i refuse to be quiet about gay rights, stem cell research, evolution, abortion, or anything else i’m passionate about because it may offend someone else’s beliefs.

it seems to me that there’s some unspoken rule i had agreed to. that because i don’t have a g-d or imaginary elf associated with my beliefs, they’re somehow less important. that’s simply not true.

i do not need a g-d to validate me. i do not need a hell to scare me into being a good person. i handle that all on my own. i’m out, and i’m proud.

I wasn’t actually raised an atheist. Both of my parents technically professed a religion. Dad was Methodist, Mom was southern Baptist. However they never went to church or talked about God or the Bible. Religion was strictly a label and not a very frequently worn one.

I figured out early on that my friends believed in God. At first I didn’t really see it. I went to Sunday school with them sometimes and it was fun but it never occurred to me that anybody actually believed it. When I figured that out I though it was weird and silly. I soon learned to keep that opinion to myself.

I was about fourteen when I finally “came out” I was in a rebellious stage anyway, and I just stopped keeping quiet about it. At first I got a little flack about it. This was particularly funny coming from friends with pentacles on their jackets and Slayer tapes in their stereos. However it didn’t take long before people just accepted it.

No one really seemed to care. It has only been in the last few years that my atheism has been an issue with anyone. Lately people have started to ask questions, sometimes positively other times less so. Recently I have become a “Militant Anti-Theist” I blog about atheism, argue with Christians, belong to atheist groups. For the first time in my life I am seeing it as a part of my identity as well as just a lack of belief. I can’t say if it is good or bad, but I know I am not ashamed of being Godless I embrace it.

i have been an atheist since i was maybe twelve. before that, my incredibly christian relatives insisted upon forcing me into religion. most of my life until the age of twelve, though, i was an agnostic trying to figure out why i was supposed to believe in god. after coming godless, i had several other religious attempts with different variations to see if they were any different than christianity. they were, but not quite enough for my taste. now, i am a proud atheist and refusing to change. faith just never worked for me.

Easter Sunday was a good day for us when we were kids, second only to Christmas Day. We couldn’t wait to get home after Mass to unwrap our chocolate eggs! We’d remain in our Sunday best most of the day, as family and friends filed through my parents’ house for tea and biscuits. The religious significance of this day wasn’t lost on us either, especially after having just sat through an interminably long sermon by the parish priest about The Resurrection. A scattering of palm-leaf crosses could still be found on the tops of cupboards and shelves, or tucked away behind a picture of Pope John Paul II; souvenirs from our visit to church on the Palm Sunday the week before.

But that was back then. Things are different for me now, as far as church and religion are concerned.

School Years

Just to give you a backgrounder, I was raised a Catholic. In the Catholic schools I attended—particularly junior (or middle) school—Religious Education featured prominently in the curriculum. I remember learning the Catechism by rote then having to recite it in class along with my fellow pupils, or having to say the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary as a group when we were gathered in the assembly hall each morning.

R.E. was definitely an important part of the curriculum and we sometimes had drop-in visits by the local priest, who’d test our knowledge of the bible by putting us on the spot with his many questions relating to the Old and New Testaments.

The headmaster at our junior school, Mr. McGowan, was fond of interrupting our regular classes in order to stage an impromptu Q&A session about the Catholic faith. Mr. McGowan had a predilection for confusing us when asking such questions. One of his favourite methods was to stare at one pupil and call his or her name before asking his question, while actually pointing at someone else sat on the other side of room as he posed his question. The unlucky subjects of both gaze and finger would stare at each other, dumbstruck, as they each waited for the other to answer first. Neither pupil could know for sure who was actually required to answer. Of course, the two would then receive a reprimand for not being able to read his mind.

It was a ridiculously inane way to teach and its sole purpose was to stroke a power-hungry ego, I’m sure. It also had the effect of instilling a sense of dread in our young minds whenever he entered the classroom.

Confessions

My parents were practising Catholics, my father having converted to Catholicism from Protestantism in order to marry my mother. My mother’s side of the family, being Irish, were fervent followers of the Catholic faith. We had lots of cousins on the distaff side, some of whom were nuns or missionaries.

As children, we were expected to attend Mass with our parents every Sunday until we reached 16 years of age, at which point we were allowed to go to church with friends and cousins. We often skipped Mass, however, and would hang around outside St. Gregory’s church, making sure we weren’t discovered until it was over. When Mass was finished and the congregation began to file out of the church, we’d make our way home with the rest of the crowd; at this point, we were usually seen by friends of the family, who’d then be able to attest to our presence there, should our parents ask.

We were also expected to go to the Confessional at least once a month to unburden ourselves of sin. I never really thought I did anything bad as a child, so I used to have a whole list of trivial and not-so-trivial sins on standby, which I’d mix up every now and then when I was in the Confessional, just to make it sound more authentic.

Moral Lessons

I’d have to say that throughout my childhood and teenage years I did believe in God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the importance of absolute faith, the perils of sin, the horrors of hell. I remember at times having a feeling of being watched, or judged, and of having a sense of dread at what would happen to me if I should die. Would I be saved? Would I go to heaven? Would I end up in hell? This feeling of being watched was constantly reinforced by the amount of Catholic paraphernalia, either hanging on the walls or standing on any available flat surface in our house and the homes of our aunts and uncles, whom we visited regularly. Pictures of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family, past and present Popes, crucifixes, crosses, statues of saints and monks and friars of significance could be found in each and every room in the house in which I was raised. There was no escape. You just couldn’t get away from the disapproving frown on the face of some old pope, which would be hanging near a picture of a saint, for example, wearing an expression of beatitude and love.

This was my childhood. The meanings and moral lessons associated with these religious icons were constantly being reaffirmed in our day-to-day interaction and conversations with older aunts, uncles, friends of the family and whatever priest happened to be overseeing our parish at the time.

I remember, one time, lying on the bed beside my mother as she rested during the day—and as Jesus, Mary and Joseph stared down at us from her bedroom wall. I was about 8 or 9 years old and we were talking about baptism, the bible and the Catholic faith. I asked her what would’ve happened to all those people born throughout history before the coming of Christ. I was surprised to hear her say that these people—which included innocent children and babies—could never attain salvation, simply because they hadn’t been baptised into the Christian faith. I’m not a hundred per cent sure if this was actually true according to the Church’s teachings or not, but I remember how horrified I felt for those unlucky, unbaptised masses. I tried putting forward naive arguments, such as its not being their fault they were born when they were, before the coming of Christ; or that they may have led good, honest lives.

But my pleas on their behalf just didn’t cut the mustard—these people were toast.

I believe that was a major moral crossroads in my life, one which led to scepticism regarding the tenets of not just Catholicism, but any religion. Scepticism, in fact, not only for an unjust religion in general, but eventually anything supernatural. It all just started to seem like nothing but myth, with no basis in fact.

Enlightening Times

I would say I have a very down-to-earth personality, one which responds well to logic and reason. I was always interested in science, particularly biology, physics, and astronomy. My putting aside of religion came about slowly, over a long period of time, I now know, in which I wasn’t really aware of what was happening. The process followed on the heels of my scepticism and I just began to believe less and less in any type of religious teachings, without thinking too much about this sea change in me. Any kind of faith that required unconditional belief in supernatural beings—simply because it was written in a book—seemed puerile and lacking. Anecdotal evidence based on revelation and dogma just wasn’t good enough for me.

Throughout history, many disparate and diverse societies had believed in one god or another, worshiping them and even sacrificing to them on a regular basis. There was a time when people believed in Odin and Thor, Zeus, or Apollo. The Ancient Egyptians believed in the sun god, Ra. Reams of literature had been written about each of these deities. I began to realise that if you used the premise that there’s only one god, that your religion is the truth and that all others are false because it’s written so in your sacred book, then the same premise can also be used to explain a whole pantheon of gods (as was the case for pre-Christian Roman society, and even some extant religions such as Hinduism). How could one claim a monopoly on the truth, based on questionable revelation and dubious translation of ancient texts, when other religions could make an equally valid claim? This way of thinking seemed somehow intrinsically flawed.

Aside from these discrepancies I associated with religion, I came to realise I had a problem with how divisive it was, how inhumane and uncaring many of its practitioners were in contrast to the central thrust of its teachings. If anything, religion and its followers were—in the main—more tribal and protective of their beliefs, rather than tolerant and compassionate towards others who held different, or opposing, views.

And yet the basic tenets of these beliefs were supposedly based on compassion, and an adherence to a set of high moral standards and guidelines.

As a gay person trying to lead as good a life as possible and to help people in any way I could (not because a book told me to do so, but because it was in my very nature), I had a lot of trouble reconciling religion with basic human rights, to the extent that religion lost out in my eventual philosophy and interpretation of the world. In short, I finally realised that I was living my life without religion or faith, and that it was okay to be that way. In fact it felt good, if not downright liberating, to be rid of the side effects of religion and dogma. Effects such as guilt or fear at having sinned. Not to mention the mind-numbing, expected obeisance to the Church in general and to God in particular. Independence and freethinking weren’t desirable traits amongst the flock, and certainly weren’t encouraged in any way, shape, or form by the priests in my childhood.

My way of thinking and eventual freedom from religion led me to the belief (if I may use that word) that this life is all we have. Nothing else. Just this one shot at happiness and enjoyment of the world and all it has to offer. This understanding makes faith in any of the major religions, or belief in any of the lesser known world views, seem so trivial. But that’s just my own point of view, something we’re all entitled to—be it religious or not. That’s something I’d like to emphasize here. I know this isn’t how holders of such beliefs would see it, and that to them my way is anathema. But, however firmly they believe in their religion there are many millions of people who believe just as firmly in another, opposing religion.

And the basis for their faith is almost entirely dependent upon the culture into which they were born and raised.

Nowadays, religion fascinates me from a cultural and sociological perspective. It still has the power to shape whole societies and influence the decision-making processes of reasonable, rational people in the 21st Century. Other than that, it holds no sway over me. The only awe I feel at being inside a church is for the architecture of the place, or its historical importance. I appreciate the aesthetics of magnificent buildings, and churches and cathedrals always seemed to be the jewels in the crown of human architectural achievements.

But that’s all they are to me now.

Atheism is very much a part of who I am. I join with other atheists in many venues. I used to follow what the Baptist church told me to follow—no questions asked. In my late teens, my closest friend taught me how to question. He and I didn’t agree on many things philosophically, but we did question each other and others.

I believe it’s important to help others in many ways. I currently volunteer in about a dozen projects, either daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. There is no god who will help the ones asking for help. We must be the ones. If a homeless child needs help with education because he misses a lot of school, it’s my responsibility to make sure he gets that help. If a senior needs to get out from in front of the TV, I’m responsible for taking her out for a walk. If a stretch of a street needs a regular litter pick-up, I am the one to do it. God won’t do those things.

While I don’t throw my atheism in anyone’s face, when the subject comes up, I’m very proud to announce my belief.

One thing I do throw in people’s face is skepticism. I am quick to point out the dangers in following “psychics,” astrologers, and other such charlatans. Some say there’s no harm in getting a tarot card reading or some such. Au contraire. These people prey on the emotions and the pocketbook of the vulnerable. They must be stopped!

There is little that I can do. But I can do something. It is important that I do what I can. If you do what you can, together, we’ll make a difference.